Conventional computerized devices, such as personal computers, laptop computers, and the like utilize graphical user interfaces in applications, such as operating systems, and graphical editors (i.e., web page editors, document editors, etc.) that enable users to quickly provide input and create documents and/or projects using “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) technology. In general, using a graphical user interface, a user operates an input device such as a mouse or keyboard to manipulate graphical objects on a computer display. The graphical objects are often represented as icons, and the user can operate an input device such as a mouse to move a mouse pointer onto an icon (i.e., graphically overlapping the icon) on the graphical user interface. By depressing a mouse button, the application (such as the operating system desktop) selects the icon, and if the user maintains the mouse button in a depressed state, the user can drag the icon across the graphical user interface. By releasing the mouse button, the icon is placed on the graphical user interface at the current position of the mouse pointer. Using graphical user interface technology, users can create and update documents (i.e., web pages, brochures, etc) and/or projects, such as a editing a Digital Video Disk (DVD), by dragging and dropping graphical objects (i.e., video clips, etc) into the project. A DVD project is produced by linking together video clips in a directed graph that often contains cycles. This is also known as a directed cyclic graph. A cyclic graph is a graph comprised of nodes and node edges, where at least one node is connected to at least one other node.
DVD logic, and nearly every form of interactive animation, is composed of a set of states, or nodes. These states or nodes can be video clips (or menus) that may be connected to any other state or node in the navigation logic through a limited set of user choices available to the user (i.e., the links that connect the nodes or states together). Often, the path of navigation logic results in returning to a previously visited state, thereby forming a cycle.